Now for a weapon of some distraction

Politically, the report tabled tomorrow on Australia's intelligence before the Iraq war is more likely to be a weapon of mass distraction than an agent of major destruction.

Last week, the Government swung public debate on to the population's ageing and superannuation, but the release of the findings by the parliamentary committee will be a setback for it in its fight to resist the Latham surge.

Also, the heat around the issue has now been increased with the claim that British intelligence spied on Kofi Annan before the Iraq war, and allegations that the mobile phone of former weapons inspector Hans Blix was tapped by the Americans or British.

This has a local twist with news that, under intelligence sharing, Australia got transcripts. The Opposition is demanding the Government state its stand on the principle: should the UN Secretary-General be beyond surveillance?

This comes on top of embarrassment following The Age's disclosure that a senior intelligence officer had indicated that advice going to the Government before the Iraq war cast doubt on some Bush Administration claims justifying invasion.

The officer - Frank Lewincamp, head of the Defence Intelligence Organisation, which provides defence-related assessments - later outed himself. Rather bizarrely, he had made his loose-lipped comments to a class at the Australian National University. While Lewincamp later disputed that he had said everything reported, the bottom line is that he had demonstrated that the line was not as monolithic as the Government would want us to believe.

So tomorrow's tabling is in the context of new batches of questions at home and abroad surrounding the pre-war intelligence, advice and behaviour.

Nevertheless, the situation could be much worse for John Howard, who faces nothing like the pressures on Tony Blair and George Bush.

The committee's assault... is expected to be rifle fire not heavy artillery.

The Australian electorate has moved on from the Iraq debate. Although this aftermath does have implications for the PM's credibility, if Howard loses the election, his postwar problems over his prewar WMD claims will have been only a second or third-order issue.

Luckily for Howard, the parliamentary committee which has prepared tomorrow's report - the joint committee on ASIO, ASIS and DSD - is conservative and responsible. Its practice is to seek consensus, as it has done with this inquiry. Among its members are two former Labor defence ministers, Kim Beazley and Robert Ray, both highly solicitous of the intelligence community and unwilling to score political points at its expense.

So the committee's assault on the Government and the intelligence agencies is expected to be rifle fire not heavy artillery. There will be pain and damage but no lethal blow. Anyway, everyone has had plenty of time to prepare. In the name of national security, the Government and agencies received the report in advance.

The Government has reduced its impact by a leak: it has made it known it will set up a further inquiry, as the committee has recommended.

If the Government is seen to be doing what a committee including Labor heavyweights has proposed it should, this takes some of the sting out of the Opposition's attack.

Labor has been urging a royal commission on the handling of the intelligence. But the expectation is that the committee will recommend something much more modest. If, for instance, it suggests an inquiry by someone with intelligence experience, this would be a good outcome for the Government.

The issues will be the terms of reference for the inquiry and when it reports. The British inquiry into intelligence on WMD will report in the northern summer. The investigation set up by Bush is not finishing until after the November presidential election.

The Government obviously would not want a reporting date near the election, expected to be around October. It has the option of either a long, drawn-out inquiry, or a relatively short one, depending on how it judges the politics. A short inquiry would have narrower terms of reference.

If it went for a longer reporting time, it would come in for immediate Opposition criticism, but it would be hard for Labor to make a great deal of the issue while the inquiry is under way. A short inquiry - one would think the more sensible option from the Government's point of view - would be open to attack over terms of reference but would clear the issue away well before the election and be in tune with the British timetable.

Labor on Friday sought to counter the Government's spin in advance of tomorrow's report with foreign affairs spokesman Kevin Rudd releasing a dossier of what the Opposition calls Howard's "excuses as to why he is not responsible... for his Government's handling of pre-war intelligence on Iraq" - and its replies. The seven "excuses" that Labor cites, and the replies, are:

1. The Government says it did not "sex up" or doctor the intelligence documents on Iraqi WMD. This isn't the charge, says Labor; rather, the charge was that the Government had used the intelligence selectively, and "did not convey to the Australian public the doubts that were contained in the intelligence material... on the status of Iraqi WMD".

2. The Government dismisses the error over WMD by pointing to the advantage of getting rid of a dictator. Labor condemns this as an after-the-event justification, not in the Government's legal opinion on the war.

3. Howard makes a "Pearl Harbour" argument that, if the US and its allies did not get in first, they risked being caught napping. The Opposition says any pre-emption must rest on accurate intelligence about an immediate threat.

4. The Government shifts blame to the intelligence community, with Howard maintaining his actions were based on advice. But, the Opposition argues, by the second half of 2002 the Government was headed to war and, from "that time on, and particularly from the end of 2002 to the beginning of hostilities on March 20, 2003, it would have taken a very brave intelligence official to have withstood the pressure from above on what sort of assessments would be welcomed by the Government. Doubts on Iraqi WMD would have to be progressively removed from the assessment product."

Drawing on Lewincamp's evidence to a Senate committee and journalist Mark Forbes's reports in The Age, Labor also points to the apparent range of assessments from the Defence Intelligence Organisation, "particularly early in 2002, casting major doubts on the Government's early claims that there were 'no doubts' that Iraq possessed stockpiles of completed chemical and biological weapons and was reconstituting its nuclear weapons capabilities. The Howard Government selectively chose to ignore these politically problematic assessments".

5. The Government blames the US and Britain, with Howard saying 97 per cent of the intelligence was foreign-sourced. Labor argues that high reliance on foreign intelligence just increased the obligation to make sure Australia had the resources to make independent assessments of that intelligence.

6. Howard says that Labor also believed Iraq had WMD. But Labor's intelligence briefings were provided by the Government, Labor retorts.

7. The Government argues a royal commission is not needed. Labor says the Government is just trying to restrict the scope of the inquiry; a royal commission could compel witnesses, including ministers, to appear.

Obviously, Labor will use whatever negatives there are in tomorrow's report to chip further at Howard's believability, but the Opposition does not have much to gain by keeping WMD centre-stage beyond an immediate hit.

Latham is making good ground politically but his strengths are in different areas, and on domestic ground. If Labor gets too bogged down on WMD, it might score tactical points but risk losing strategic advantage.

Latham is also carefully positioning himself so that, while stressing the need for a distinct Australian identity, he is not seen as anti-American. This would encourage him to take quick pickings from the WMD issue but not dwell too long on it.

That is the politics, but under the political debate there are important matters of substance.

Australia, inevitably, is going to be highly dependent on foreign intelligence on areas outside its region. It is vital it can evaluate this effectively at home and in its foreign posts.

There were all-round intelligence lapses and misjudgements before the Iraq war, so probably Australian agencies were never going to come out shining. But what has happened suggests they need to be sharper. They also need a deeper culture of questioning orthodoxies. To what extent they did this will be gleaned from tomorrow's report and the inquiry to come, but it was not enough. There is a real risk that the weakening of muscle and will to tell political masters what they do not want to hear which has overtaken the public service may have also affected the intelligence agencies.

And now they must be demoralised by criticisms over performance, as well as by being thrust into the political spotlight.

The agencies are in for a further difficult period of scrutiny. It must be managed in such a way that they do not become even more cautious, when the fostering of an inquiring mentality and a brave spirit is what's required.